I had only just signed up for my Yoga teacher training program when days later I found out I was pregnant with my son. I was only 5 weeks pregnant, but felt it appropriate to share the news with the teacher and the rest of the class because the pregnancy would prevent me from taking part in many of the physical elements of the class and I wanted them to know why. I remember after sharing the news, one of the other students, who is not a mother might I add, commented on how my spiritual path would now come to an end because pregnancy would limit me and becoming a mother would mean I wouldn’t have the time to do anything anymore. 

True, I must admit I did have my own fears in terms of how being pregnant and becoming a mother would influence the time I spent on myself and my own personal and spiritual evolution. I mean, I was already affected just by the strain of the nausea, the extreme fatigue and the emotional up’s and down’s that changed from a minute to minute basis during my early pregnancy. I simply wasn’t able to even think about doing Yoga in the first 16 weeks of my pregnancy. I could hardly even breathe without feeling I needed to throw up, never mind practice Yoga Asana’s or sitting and meditating for long periods of time! I was falling out of a familiar routine of daily yoga & meditation practice that gave me a sense of peace, familiarity and control over my body and mind, and more importantly, my life.

Through my practice I went into periods of deep undisturbed self enquiry, I learnt a lot about myself during those times of practice and life was really making sense to me as a result. My Yoga mat was my place of refuge, my sanctuary. It was the place I went to seek resolve to the inner and outer issues I felt challenged with in my daily life. Now, being pregnant made me feel out of control, helpless, lost and almost psychotic because I has no idea what was going on and I felt I was losing it! I was so exhausted I could hardly even think about anything that was intellectually or spiritually challenging and just as I would get to grips with feeling a certain way, I would be hit with yet another symptom, emotion or thought that scared me to death or made me feel weak and vulnerable.

My body was also changing rapidly and drastically! One thing that has always been important to me is having a good physical appearance. To some that may sound superficial, and it may be in some cases for some people, but it depends on how or why appearance is important to the individual. In my case I like to have a fit, healthy, strong, toned and slender body because I feel it is important in terms of being a yogi as it is the outer expression of all the inner work, i.e. discipline, moderation, not taking more than you need, non-violence as over indulging can hurt your body and ultimately is a form of violence if you are harming yourself knowingly, listening to the demands of your body and respecting your body when it has had enough, exercising your body and respecting it as the vehicle of your soul in this lifetime. Those are all good enough reasons to me to justify the desire to have a pleasant outer appearance. Now my body was changing, growing and sagging. I was constantly hungry in between the periods of feeling sick. I couldn’t stop eating and even my friends and work colleagues commented on how much food I carried with me from place to place! I honestly felt greedy and disgusting and it was all beyond my control, or so I thought at least.

Amidst all of this fear and stress, I felt I had become disconnected from the inner peace and resulting silence I had worked so hard on sustaining, yet little did I know that in amongst all that inner noise that the chaos of my life at that moment were some of the greatest opportunities for some serious personal and spiritual growth. Just while I thought my spiritual path of personal growth and evolution was coming to an end, just as predicted by my colleague, it apparently was only just beginning!

It is funny because I was often guilty of overlooking the opportunities for growth and evolution that lie in the most unexpected of places because I was too busy trying to bend and flex my body, and sitting quietly for long periods of time, meditating on silence and striving to reach that inner peace and enlightenment I was looking for fill me liberation from the daily grind.

It is easy to drive yourself crazy with all of this routine and ritual, thinking you are walking a librated path when really it can get to the stage of being nothing more than controlling, or even obsessive when you become upset with being unable to find other ways of practicing Yoga when life leads you into situations that prevents you from practicing, breaking the familiar mould, shaking the foundations of your security and stability, forcing you into periods of change and challenging you to seek new and perhaps more practical and appropriate ways of doing things. The feeling of obsession that I experienced became apparent in the state of panic that filled me when I wasn’t able to do the things I could previously do before I was pregnant. I had control then in my practice, with pregnancy it was gone. I was terrified and felt lost and out of control and thought there was nothing else to do!

How liberated are we really when we are terrified of facing change in our ways of doing things? How liberated are we really when being able to experience peace and silence within is dependant on outer circumstances and a specific set of actions, such as blocking out day light, any sounds and sitting in a certain position and trying to disengage from your thoughts?  We partake in all of those actions to practice and meditate because we believe that is the only path to that place where we can experience the peace and bliss that is a part of having inner silence. Sure, thousands of years ago that may have worked for the sages of India who practiced Yoga as a way of purifying the mind and body, and so they would be able to sit for long periods of undisturbed meditation to connect with the Universal Source, or God energy.

Monks do it too, in temples and monasteries in places like the Himalayas. Sure it works for them, why? Because their life is totally different from ours, they live in very controlled circumstances, often not even speaking to another person for want of not disturbing their own inner harmony and understanding of spiritual awareness. They are able to maintain that silence for that is all they have known. They are not subjected to the same conditions we are in the western world such as stress, fear, the money race, family issues, abuse, hate, anger, rage, violence, murder, lying, stealing and all the other glorious conditions that characterize the world we live in. In most cases those monks are isolated, alone in their own little world, while here we are trying to merely survive, looking to find a shred of insight to make sense of it all, and if we are really lucky, we might come across some happiness and inner peace as a result.

My experience in life has taught me that life requires you to be an active participant and that mastery of life in the 21st century requires you to embrace the reality of what is happening in the present moment, to accept it and be really present with what is going on, whether it is something you can control or not.  My pregnancy taught me some of the greatest lessons I have ever learnt in terms of how to handle and understand life and what it throws at you. Just when I thought I had mastered it all and had it all under control with reasonable ways of dealing with my life through self enquiry, yoga and meditation practice, it was all pulled out from under my feet when pregnancy struck, and what I thought was the end of my path, happened to be just the beginning. 

With early pregnancy my peace was shattered, my happiness and sense of bliss disappeared, my feeling of health and well-being was completely gone, and my sense of self-control was stolen away. As I lay in bed one evening staring at the ceiling feeling totally powerless, I realized that I had no sense of real identity anymore because all of the things that used to define who I was in body, mind and soul had been taken away by the circumstances of the pregnancy and I now I was forced into a place where I had to find a way to change this. I had to discover who I really was.

In that moment I realized that you cannot change that which you are unable to accept, and even if you cannot change the outer circumstances, you can change your inner response to it. I was of course overjoyed that I was having a child, but I didn’t expect pregnancy to be as hard as it was at that time. So I decided that instead of crying or feeling sorry for myself and resisting the changes that were occurring, why not look at in from a new perspective and really look for the miracle that was happening in each and every moment as my body changed. As I considered the nausea and vomiting, I realized it was a natural bodily response to being pregnant that prevented me from physically practicing yoga. Instead of feeling angry and upset that I couldn’t exercise and relax, I decided to honor and respect my body for responding to the pregnancy in such a thoughtful and intelligent way that forced me to rest, lie down while it had the energy, space and time to do what it needed to do to nourish and sustain the tiny life that was growing in my belly.

I realized I had to find the courage to surrender to what was happening and embrace the changes instead of resisting them because that was all I really could do. I discovered that surrendering to whatever is happening in your life is one of the greatest gifts you can give to yourself. There is a great power in surrender as with it comes acceptance, peace, forgiveness, compassion and the ability to trust in the unfolding of the process of life. You let go of the need to control things, you experience a sense of humility, vulnerability and become able to turn circumstances over to the intelligence of the universe, with an inner sense of knowing that everything will evolve to be just as it is meant to be.

You cannot feel this sense of trust and knowing however, when you are trying to control, hold on and resist. I learnt in this experience that true inner peace comes from the ability to accept life’s circumstances, to have the courage to surrender and let them go and to trust that things will be exactly as they should be in the end, that life knows what it needs to do to sustain and nurture itself in any circumstance, as long as you allow that intelligence to guide you, instead of you trying to change and control it.

After realizing this, and of course acting on the awareness because knowing and living what you know is not the same thing, I felt flooded with a sense of inner peace and a different sense of direction in my life that I never ever felt before. I no longer felt the need to control or direct events and circumstances to suit what I thought was right for me, I simply stepped aside, liberating myself from trying to create the events and outcomes the way I wanted them to be and allowed the Universe to guide me in the way it wanted to.

Of course, I am in no way implying here that you become idle when it comes to taking responsibility for your life by being able to make choices and act on them in ways that are right for you, I am simply saying that there comes a time in life where there is nothing else to do except stand back and let life guide you in the right direction. The state of your inner emotions will let you know when that time comes, and you will know because you will feel as I did, helpless, lost, afraid and that everything was out of control.

In the space of surrender was where I learnt that the peace that comes from true inner silence is something that can only be experienced by learning to embrace the chaos and stress of life’s constant change and flux as oppose to trying to control, deny and block things out. There is great wisdom to be attained in the face of chaos, change and adversity, and our challenge in this day and age is to appropriate ways of handling it all, instead of running away and trying to block it out.

Now I am a mum and what I learnt in my pregnancy prepared me greatly for the many challenges that come with motherhood. I surrendered into the role of being a mother easily; I accepted my long and very difficult labor just as it was and looked upon it as being the perfect experience for me. I looked upon that event as being the most empowering event of my life and celebrated it instead of looking upon the aspects of it that didn’t go quite the right way as being failures. I accepted the long nights, short sleeps, the feelings of vulnerability in moments of not knowing how to handle my child, I accepted his cries as being his way of communicating his needs to me in the middle of the night instead of feeling he was a hindrance to me. I accepted it when I had to jump out of my first relaxing bath only 2 minutes after stepping into the water to change his diaper when he dirtied it! I surrendered myself completely to my son and his needs and I surrendered into and accepted all the emotional up’s and down’s I felt during the process, the good and bad, the afraid and the ecstatic. I love and accepted every moment of it, and I still do.

My life has become so easy and peaceful and what a blessing it was for me to have learnt that I could choose to have inner peace whenever I wanted to, no matter the circumstance. I learnt that it is ok to accept and embrace fear and the chaos that comes with the unfamiliar and unknown, because it doesn’t mean you are weak or incapable, on the other hand it makes you brave, courageous and very strong! Above all, I learnt being silent within doesn’t require silence on the outside and that was the greatest lesson of all, as it has liberated me from the constant need to keep practicing Yoga and meditation compulsively. Nowadays, I do practice Yoga and meditation regularly, but I now do it for the right reasons, and in ways that suits my busy schedule as a mum. That works out just fine for me and my son, we are happy, healthy and content and our growth together hasn’t been affected one bit, in fact, it is thriving! 

Namaste